Improving patient safety

Simon Keady and Meera Thacker offer an insight into the rationale and steps being taken in response to recent NPSA alerts.

Reference

Keady S. and Thacker M. (2008) National Patient Safety Agency: Improving patient safety across all critical care areas. Intensive and Critical Care Nursing. 24, p.137-140.

“The National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) reviews patient safety incidents throughout the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom and aims to initiate preventative measures. Recent alerts include injectable medication, oral syringes for enteral administration, preventing hyponatraemia in children and anticoagulation. This article gives an insight into the rationale and steps currently being undertaken to respond to these recommendations” (Keady and Thacker 2008).

New extravasation guidelines

The European Oncology Nursing Society have just issued new chemotherapy extravasation guidelines. The guidance is comprehensive and includes risk factors, explains recognition and includes examples of documentation… plus much more. Click here to view the full document.

Community IV’s for children

Just had a request for information concerned with children in receipt  of IV’s in the community. I could not help much :-(However, I am aware of the RCN publication Administering IV therapy to children in the community. If anyone has any additional information I am happy to post on this site.

New saving lives high impact interventions

The Department of Health have revised the care bundles for a number of high impact interventions such as cannulation and central venous catheters. Chlorhexidine 2% gets a number of mentions and the dwell time for peripheral cannulae has been extended to 96 hours - wow!

NMC Standards for medicine management

Just to quickly draw your attention to new standards concerned with medicine management from the NMC. The standard has a few sections concerned with intravenous drug administration. It is of particular interest that the standard recommends that two people (one the registrant) checks IV drugs. The new standard can be viewed here.

VIP score

Infusion phlebitis is an IV problem that continues to impact upon patient care. The RCN state that infusion phlebitis rates should not exceed 5%. The Visual

Infusion Phlebitis (VIP) score was developed to assist with the monitoring of cannula sites.

Check out the VIP score at the following link - VIP score

Blood cultures

Recent advice from the DoH (Department of Health) has focussed upon standardising the approach taken when obtaining blood cultures. In particular the guidance looks at reducing the incidence false positives. Hopefully taking the incidence of false positives from approximately  Read more